The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Are you all right?” Scooping hot meatloaf onto a plate, it said, “This organic form is difficult to master. It seems I required another minor physiological upgrade.” Then it pulled a second steaming plate from the trough, more meatloaf just like the first, and two cups of cool yellow milk. “Come on, we’ll eat together.”

  We settled on the living room floor and I started in. Robot picked up a chunk of meat in its hand, turning it over and over, as if nonplused.

  That’s me, I thought. “What’s wrong?”

  It looked at me. “I have some inhibitions about eating what seems like it must come from a living being.”

  “Synthetic.”

  “When I was really a robot, I knew that. The organic processor seems to have a little difficulty with the concept.”

  “Hey, if I don’t mind eating myself, why should you?”

  “True.” It popped the glob of ground wally in its mouth and started to chew. And I felt myself grow goosebumps.

  Afterward, we had ice cream, sweeter now than before, with something very much like the vanilla flavor I’d been wanting. Robot took a taste, and said, “This is good. Maybe next time I can make it better, now that I’m getting some idea of what it’s supposed to be like.”

  But it put the plate down, hardly touched.

  I put out my hand, not quite touching its arm. “Tell me what’s really wrong.”

  Something very like a sigh. “Oh, many things, Wally.”

  I felt chillier inside than the ice cream would account for. “Such as?”

  “I can’t figure out how to get you home.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I can’t figure out what’s happened to my civilization, either. I don’t know where they’ve gone. Or why they’re gone.” It pushed the other plate of ice cream toward me. “You have this, please.”

  “Sure.”

  After a while, I said, “Do you even know where we are?”

  “Yes. My galaxy. My world.”

  “In the same galaxy as Earth?”

  “I don’t think so, Wally.”

  “Oh.”

  I finished the ice cream and Robot took the dishes away, walking slowly. By the time it got back, I was shaking out my blanket, starting to settle down to sleep, wishing again I had a book, any book. Christ, I’d settle for Green Mansions or Lord Jim now. Even The Red Badge of Courage.

  Robot stood there, looking down on me, arms hanging loosely by its sides, looser than I’d ever seen, more than just exhausted. I threw back the blanket and patted a spot on the floor by my side. “Come on. If you need to eat now, maybe you need to sleep too.”

  It curled up with me under the blanket. After a minute, it grew warm, then another minute and I guess I went to sleep.

  I awoke, eyes shut, not quite knowing what I’d been dreaming. Some real-life thing, I suppose, nothing bad, or the dream would still be a vivid shape in my heart. Something warm on my chest, not quite like hugging my extra pillow. And, of course, the usual hard on, but somehow compressed and tight, pushed against the base of my belly.

  Oh, God. I’m hugging Robot!

  I started to let go, trying not to panic, wondering what the hell was tickling the end of my nose.

  Forced my eyes open. There was a neck right in front of my face. A skinny neck with Caucasian-white skin, rising into wisps of pale blonde hair. Long blonde hair drawn up into tight braids, braids wrapped round and round . . .

  I think every muscle in my body went into some tetanus-like spasm. I took a deep breath, so fast and tight my voice made this weird, high-pitched whoop, recoiled, rolling away, up onto my hands and knees, taking the blanket with me, crouching there, bug-eyed again, heart pounding like mad.

  Pulling the blanket away like that spilled the naked girl over onto her face. She lifted her head and looked at me, out of bleary blue eyes, and whispered, “Wally . . . ?” her voice sounding tired and confused.

  And I made that exact same sound Jackie Gleason used to make, dumbfounded in almost every “Honeymooners” episode, humminahummina . . .

  She sat up slowly, turning to face me, sitting cross-legged, eyes brightening as she woke up, just the way a human wakes up. Pale skin, smooth all over, little pink nipples on a smooth, flat chest, snub nose with a little pale spray of freckles, big, big blue eyes, naked as a jaybird, but for the brass-colored bobby-pins holding up her braids.

  “Good morning, Wally!”

  I sat down hard. Swallowed. Or tried to, anyway. “Tracy?”

  She cocked her head to one side and smiled, filling the room with sunshine. “I think so, Wally. Anyway, this is the girl you’ve been dreaming about.”

  “My . . . dreams.”

  Funny thing. Usually when your mouth goes dry, it just is dry, all at once, or maybe before you notice it. This time, I felt my spit absorbed by my tongue, like water sucked into a dry sponge.

  She said, “Yes, Wally.”

  What was the name of that story? Silverberg, was it? In the Seventh Galaxy Reader or maybe Best From F&SF, Seventh Series. The one where the telepath sees people’s thoughts as run-on sentences connected by ampersand characters.

  “You can . . . read my mind.” Flat. Nervous. Sick.

  She stood slowly, stretching like a real human, as though stiff from sleep, hips slim, just the littlest bit of fine blonde pubic hair in a patch above that little pink slit.

  Eleven years old, I thought. I remembered most of the girls in junior high started to grow tits when they were in seventh grade.

  She saw where I was looking and smiled, then said, “Sort of. Not as well as I’d like to.” Then gave me a funny look. “How do you think I learned to speak English? From listening to you chatter?”

  I snatched my eyes away, feeling my face heat up. Yes. That’s exactly what I’d thought.

  “Uh. Does that bother you? My talking all the time?” It bothered a lot of people, including my parents. I think it even bothered Murray, though most of the time he was willing to listen.

  She said, “Oh, no, Wally! I love talking to you!” Eyes brightening. I suddenly remembered Tracy’d said that to my eleven-year-old self, once upon a time. Then this Tracy – Robot, a hard voice in my head snarled – said, “This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me!”

  Ever happened to Tracy? Or to Robot? I said, “Yeah, me too.” I curled myself into a seated ball, knees against my chest, heels pressed together, wishing the God-damned hard on would go away. Bathroom. You just need to take a piss, that’s all.

  Tracy . . . No! For Christ’s sake. Robot! Robot’s bright blue eyes were on my face, filled with something that could pass for empathy. The empathy in a story, anyway. She came over to where I sat, kneeling down, put a warm gentle hand on one of my knees, leaning so she could look right into my eyes.

  It. It, not her.

  I don’t think there’s a word for how scared I was, right then.

  She said, “Would you like to try the thing you’ve been dreaming about, Wally? There’s not enough detail in your dreams for me to work with, but your genetic matrix may have contributed enough X-chromosome-based hardware and instinctual behaviors to get us started.”

  I flinched, aghast, at Robot, at myself. Stuttered hard, finally got out, “But . . . you’re still a child!” The real Tracy, my Tracy, would be sixteen right now, more or less grown. This . . . thing . . .

  She sank back on her heels, looking sad, just the way the real Tracy had looked sad, sad and serious. “I’m sorry, Wally. I didn’t know that would matter.”

  For breakfast, Robot managed something a lot like bland French toast, with a lemon-yellow glob of something I suppose you could call wally-butter, though nothing like maple syrup, not even the imitation nasty Mrs. Butterworth’s crap my sisters demanded, just so they could see the bottle and repeat the “when you bow down this way!” line from the commercial.

  Every time they did that, I’d remember my own infatuation with the Log Cabin tin less than a decade earlier. It seemed dif
ferent, somehow.

  Robot brought the plate to me as I soaked in the tub, chirping, “See, Wally? I’ll figure out a way to make you real bread yet!” Then she stepped over the rim of the tub and sank down at the opposite end with a cozy little grin, chin barely clearing the surface of the water.

  “Uh.” I looked at the pile of sticky squares, steam rising, yellow butter-stuff slumping as it melted. “Is some of this yours?”

  She took a square, dipped one corner in the butter, and took a bite. “Mmmmm. . . .”

  Afterward, clean and dry after a fashion, Robot’s hair clean anyway, since it was brand new, we set out, I in my grubby shoes and socks because Robot insisted, though she herself was barefoot, feet slapping quickly on the pavement to match my pace. I’d thought about putting on my clothes, but they were still draped over the railing, so weathered and stiff now I suppose they would’ve felt like crumpled newspaper on my skin.

  I settled for keeping my eyes to myself as I followed her down the road. “Where’re we going, Robot?”

  She turned suddenly, stopping before me in the street, looking up at my face, eyes bigger still, going back to looking . . . not sad. Wistful? Maybe that was the way Tracy had looked, not sad, not serious, and the eleven-year-old me just hadn’t known any better?

  Softly, she said, “I’d like it if you call me Tracy.”

  Thunderstruck, I thought, This is a robot. Not a little girl. Not Tracy. Tracy, my Tracy, is sixteen years old, somewhere on Earth, probably still in Texas, and I . . . that other voice, dark voice that sounded to me like my dad’s voice, whispered, It’s just a robot. And if it’s just a robot, what difference does it make if . . . ? I slammed the door on that one.

  Then I said, “I’m sorry. Tracy.”

  She smiled. Brightening the day.

  “So. Where’re we going?”

  She pointed to the dome of the museum, not far away in the middle of the town, where all the radial streets came together.

  Inside, she led me right to the big blue-white-red spiral galaxy hanging under the dome, standing beside it with hands on hips, head tipped back, looking up. I wondered briefly where the bobby pins had come from, other than my memory, my dreams. From the hemoglobin in my blood? And what about the brassy color? Shouldn’t they be steely-looking? Tracy’s bobby pins had been brassy, though. Maybe there were copper molecules in the tissue sample.

  Tracy started manipulating a panel of sequins down by the pedestal, and the galaxy vanished, replaced by a shapeless, irregular splash of light and dark that looked almost like an explosion.

  She looked up at me. “This is what your culture has just begun to conceptualize as a supercluster, Wally. It’s a map of the entity you’ve been referring to as the Lost Empire.”

  My scalp prickled briefly at that reminder, but . . . hell. I was used to the idea of telepaths. Maybe that’s what made it more all right for me than it would have been for somebody else. I imagined my mom thinking someone could look into her head.

  It didn’t look like anything I remembered hearing about. Still, if she knew the term, it had to be in my head, somewhere. Some article in Scientific American, maybe? I’d always been glad the Prince William County Public Library took it. “How big?”

  She said, “Oh, it’s about three hundred million light years across, maybe.” Off to one side, a pinpoint sparkled, catching my eye. “That’s where we are right now.”

  “And . . . Earth?”

  She said, “You don’t know enough about the structure of the universe for me to tell.”

  “Uh. Sorry.”

  She grinned, then made another pinpoint twinkle, way off to the other side, pretty much outside the edge of the great splash of light. “Your Local Group might be right there. There are five galaxies matching what you know as the Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, and the Magellanic Clouds, in roughly the right positions, though you’re awfully hazy about where they really are, and exactly how big.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And there are at least twenty other galaxies mixed in with them that your astronomers must have noticed.”

  “But not me.”

  “No, Wally.”

  “Well, even if that was Earth, there’s no way. . . .”

  She made a third spot sparkle, this time deep ruby-red, deep in the heart of the Lost Empire Supercluster. “There’s a research facility here, at one of the Empire’s main educational institutions, where we can . . . figure it out, one way or another.”

  “But. . . .”

  She said, “If we could get a starship, we could get there in just a few weeks, Wally.”

  I suddenly felt odd. “And . . . Earth?”

  That wistful look. “If that’s really your Local Group, not much longer.”

  “Where else would Earth be?”

  She said, “Wally, the thing you were on was an automated space probe, just like you thought. We’d been exploring the other super-clusters for a long time.”

  “So Earth could be anywhere?” For some reason, that made me feel . . . I don’t know. Lighter. More carefree?

  She said, “Yes.”

  “What if it’s somewhere on the other side of the universe?”

  She laughed. “There’s no ‘other side,’ Wally.”

  “Very far away, anyhow. Your ships seem so fast.”

  She said, “If Earth’s not somewhere nearby, we may never find it. You seem to have no idea how big the universe really is.”

  “One of your probes found it.”

  “Yes. And that may be our only hope. The probes didn’t have infinite range.”

  “Anyway, we don’t have a starship.”

  She turned away from me then, looking out through the dome of the museum, up at the deep green sky. “I don’t know where everyone’s gone, or why, but the communication network is running just fine. I’ve been able to wake up some sleeping nodes here and there, send out program code, get a few things moving. Our ride will be here soon.”

  Then she looked at me and laughed again, I suppose, at the expression on my face.

  And so the empty world of the dark green skies was gone, never to be seen again, Tracy and I now camped out by a bubbling stream in the soft garden wilderness of a pale orange spome, pale orange landscape separated by broad stripes of blue velvet hyperspace sky. There were no dinosaurs here, and I was, in a way, sorry for that, because I’d liked them, liked the idea of them, but red-silver butterfly-bats floated through the air overhead, perched in the pale orange trees, while spidermice crept through the pale orange grass, speaking to us in gentle whispers.

  Only little things, gentle things, safe things.

  Arriving here, we’d walked away from the field of saucers, this one without fence or razor wire, while the Green Planet shrank away to nothing in the starry sky, and Tracy said to me, “No, look, you got it all wrong, Wally. Thrintun was the name of their planet. The Slavers just called themselves Thrint.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She smiled. “That’s what’s in your long-term memory. Your short-term memory just reloaded it wrong. Of course, I can’t guarantee it’s what was really in the story.”

  “Um.”

  She’d led me to a long, low, warehouse-like building, where we picked up magic toys, then walked away into the woodland, while the starship groaned off into hyperspace and the windows above us turned soft blue, in perfect contrast to the landscape, both around us and overhead. Eventually, we came to a meadow, orange grass, widely separated orange trees, kind of like gnarly little crabapple trees, complete with little orange fruit, a scattering of ruddy yellowish flowers, tiny creek chuckling over bits of round brown stone.

  We set up the tent, spread our picnic blanket, and one of the magic toys Tracy had taken turned out to be something like a hibachi, complete with built-in burgers, already smoky hot, smell making my mouth water.

  I touched one, and found it cool enough to pick up, the perfect temperature for eating. “What are these things?”


  She said, “I don’t know. But they’re chemically compatible with our bodies.”

  When you looked close, they weren’t really hamburgers. Bready disks of some kind, nicely toasted. I took a little bite. “Ukh. . . .”

  A fleck of concern lit in her eyes. “Not good?”

  I took another, bigger bite, chewed and swallowed. “Weird. Mustard and cinnamon don’t really go together.”

  She smiled. “I notice it’s not stopping you, though.”

  “No.” I finished it, and took another. “Can this thing make hot dogs?”

  “Probably.”

  Hot dogs with integrated buns. Great. In what book did I read the phrase, societé anonyme d’hippophage? I gave my head a shake, trying to banish nonsense. If possible. Christ. Me. Anyway, I’m not eating Wally anymore. Good enough.

  I said, “Who used to live in this place, Tracy? I mean, orange grass and all . . . ?”

  She said, “Nobody ever lived in these things, Wally. They were part of an automated transport system, and I think what happened is, the sample ecologies spread out in here. The spomes have been wandering around on their own for a very long time.”

  “How long?”

  A thoughtful look. “Well, from the time the first star-faring civilization got started to my manufacture date, something like a billion of your years.”

  My mouth got that familiar dry feeling. “That’s not what I meant.”

  She said, “Based on astronomical evidence, I think I was asleep in storage for a significant fraction of that. Perhaps a hundred million years?”

  “From before the end of the Cretaceous, and whatever killed off the dinosaurs?” And clearly why the robot spomes could have them in their possession. I remember some scientists theorized about a supernova.

  She said, “I don’t think there was any relationship. Wherever Earth is, it must be outside the range of the event that . . . got rid of everyone.” A momentary look of intense brooding in the eyes of a china doll, quickly banished.

  “And you have no idea how the Lost Empire got lost.”

  “Not yet. It’s illuminating that only the organic intelligences were lost.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe this,” I waved my hand around the spomey landscape, “all this, all the stuff on all the planets, has survived, intact, for a hundred million years or more.”